The House Always Wins
by ScarlettWoman710
Summary: Violet Harmon has been dead five years, and she finally knows the truth about the house.  Rated M for language, kinks and smut.  Violate.


**Author:** ScarlettWoman710

**Title:** The House Always Wins

**Summary: **Violet Harmon has been dead for five years, and she now knows the truth about the house.

**Rating:** MA

**Warning(s)/Kinks:** Language, sexual situations, blood play

**Spoilers: **Everything in all episodes if you haven't been up to date with your viewing.

**Submitted for the GiftFic Challenge!**

**A/N:** This story builds on part of a theme present in **prettypinklips'**s excellent fic, "And the Drum Beat Carries On." While our stories are quite different, they are variations on a theme and I suggest you read hers, if you haven't read it already. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank the phenomonal **Gray Glube** for her amazing works in this fandom, and the amazing **ohyellowbird **and **whodreamedit **for their fantastic joint work "Monster." **Gray Glube's** works and "Monster" have served as my muse, so thank you for writing such brilliant things.

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><p>The house is purgatory.<p>

Violet Harmon has been dead five years, and now she knows the truth. The house is there to make you figure out why you're there, why you were so unhappy with your life that you chose to end it even if you didn't know you were making the choice at the time. The house tries to help you understand but it's always unpleasant, because confronting those dark places inside of your soul always is.

Violet's father has died, not in the house surprisingly but in a car crash. Vivien has now lost a son in childbirth, a daughter, and a husband. This finally proves to be the straw that breaks the camels back and Vivien knows she has to leave the house or she's going to lose her mind. As much as she wants to believe her daughter isn't dead because she's still here and her hugs are still warm, she knows it's true because she never leaves the house and she should be in her twenties by now.

Violet understands, and tells her she wants her to go.

It's been too hard on her mother to see her like this and to hear little Calvin, the twin she lost the night he was born in the house. She never sees him, Violet makes sure of that, but he still cries. Nora and Hayden have formed an unlikely alliance and they share the baby. Hayden isn't cut out for motherhood and gets bored when he cries, passing the baby off to Nora and going to fuck Hugo or Travis instead. Nora always whisks him away to soothe him, and Vivien will wake from a dream if she hears him wail and then she'll start crying herself, because she knows there hasn't been a baby that little to cry in the house for five years.

So once Ben dies, Violet tells her to go. She doesn't want her mother to suffer anymore.

She won't miss her half sister, a little girl that looks so much like Tate it makes Violet sick to look at her. Violet's never appeared to Sunshine. Partially because she hates the name. Partially because she feels like Sunny (as her parents call her) is a Violet replacement. Sunny doesn't know who the Violet is that her mummy keeps talking about but she's glad to leave the house. Sunny likes to do bad things and the house makes those feelings even stronger.

Violet hates her. She hates her because Tate made her, raped her mother in the Rubber suit to make a baby for Nora. She hates him, too. She hasn't spoken to him in five years.

Vivien and Sunny pack their things and Violet makes herself scarce, hiding in her dad's old study. Nora comes into the room, gently rocking Cal to sleep.

"May I?" Violet asks, reaching out to take her brother.

Nora smiles and slips the infant into her arms. Nora loves her baby and loves Violet for the gentle way she caresses him. Violet has told her many times that Cal is her bother but it confuses Nora so she's stopped bothering to explain.

"Your mother is leaving?" Nora asks, looking over the boxes in the house. Violet nods.

"You'll miss her?" Violet nods again.

"There is nothing like a mothers love," Nora says decisively, nodding. "I'm sorry."

"Thanks," Violet says. A tear slides down her cheek. She passes the baby back to Nora and runs from the room.

Later, she watches her mother and half-sister leave the house. She's sad. She suddenly understands how loneliness, crushing loneliness, can make someone do crazy things. She knows that's why she took those pills, it's easy to understand now because she feels the same way. She's so lonely now, she wishes she could die.

Too late, she thinks bitterly.

And so she goes to the attic to see Beau, because she knows Tate will be there. She plunks down next to him as he rolls the ball back towards Beau.

"Don't speak," she snaps when he opens his mouth. "I don't want to talk to you."

He pushes his lips closed. Wordlessly, he passes the ball to her, and she rolls it to Beau.

* * *

><p>The house is a genie, a fucked up angel that gives you what you want but never gets it right.<p>

Violet Harmon has been dead ten years, and she now knows the truth. You have to be very specific when you make wishes in the house. If you wish for a million dollars, better say US currency, or you'll get a million dollars of fake monopoly money. Don't wish for love, or the house will send you an obsessed stalker. All the the people trapped in the house made their wishes when they blew out their candles and the house gave them the reward, but it was never what they wanted. The house feels like a confused court jester, saying "But this is what you _said_ you wanted. You _said _you wanted this." It only wants to give you what you want but it doesn't know how. It's Clarence the bumbling angel from "It's a Wonderful Life" before he's got his wings.

Violet has moved forward from being able to sit near but not speak to Tate to being able to say a few words. She was lonely enough that she let him in just that much. She's let the house in too, and with it comes new understanding. She knows how lonely her mother felt, how upset and angry at her husband and daughter and how she'd wished for a chance to scrap everything and start over, and that's what she got. Husband and daughter vanish and a fresh start in the form of a pink cheeked blond girl. She's not angry at her mother. She didn't know any better.

The family that lives in the house has a ten year old son. They are very conservative and have certain expectations of the boy that Violet already knows he's going to fall short of.

Their son likes boys.

Violet watched him discover Tate's stash of gay porn and sneak it down to his room. She already knew he was gay, because Chad and Patrick knew. She feels bad for him.

He hates his parents but loves them at the same time. Mostly, he wants them to love him just the way he is, and they don't, and it breaks his heart. He wishes they were more like the two guys that his parents hired to decorate the house. They're just like him. They love him and they seem to know whenever he's down and magically appear when he wants someone to talk to.

And so the house finds a way to give the boy what he wants. He starts to think of dark things, of the way that it feels to stab his knife into his dinner and wonders if it would feel that way to stab it into human flesh. One night he finds out, stabbing his parents in their sleep before running the knife across his throat.

Chad and Patrick are thrilled. They finally have their son.

Violet walks into the bedroom to stare down at the carnage and finds Tate already there.

"What did you wish for?" she asks him, eyes staring blankly at the bodies.

"What?"

"When you killed the kids at school. What did you wish for? Before you did it?"

Tate sighed, tilting his head, trying to remember. "I wished that I could be a good person," he says finally. "I thought that there were kids that felt like me and that I could save them from that. So I wished to be strong enough to do for them what I wanted someone to do for me."

"Go on," Violet says, taking a step closer to him.

"I wished that I could be important. I wished that I could make people remember my name. Then my mom would have to shut the fuck up, for once. And I wished that I would die. That it would be over."

"The house gave you your wish," she says.

"Not how I wanted it, though," he says.

"It never does," she says sadly. "Come on. Let's go play cards."

Tate, shocked that Violet is reaching out to him, follows her silently out of the room.

* * *

><p>The house is the devil itself.<p>

Violet Harmon has been dead fifteen years, and now she knows the truth. The house does not want to help, it wants to hurt. It wants to _feed_. It takes the broken souls of those inside and knows what they want most - fame, fortune, favor, even a good fuck - and it promises to make all of their dreams come true. It only wants one little thing in return. Just one thing, and you won't even miss it once it's gone.

It wants your soul.

And once the house gives you what you want it takes you and keeps you forever, the joke of the thing becomes clear, because the devil is many things and beautiful is just the least of it. The devil is a comedian that laughs at his own jokes and doesn't give a flying fuck if you don't think it's funny. So once you get that thing that you wanted more than anything and you've laid down to sleep and the devil's got your soul to keep, he laughs at you, at your disappointment, and says "You know what they say. Be careful what you wish for."

Because the night that Violet Harmon kills herself, before she swallowed all those pills she thought that she'd give anything, everything if she could leave all the fear and parental neglect and hatefulness of the world for a girl who's different and dresses like somebody's grandma behind and just stay forever with this boy who loves her, who's too fucked up to know that he's dead. Once she wished that the devil smiled, because that was an easy one. Like magic, she remembered the pills in her bag and thought she'd just take two or maybe twenty because even though she'd _never_ kill herself it would be nice just to sleep for awhile.

Now that she's been dead for fifteen years she know how the devil put that little idea in her mind, like a song that you can't get out of your head. And now that she's stuck with Tate forever she hears the devil laughing at his own fucking hilarity and hears him say, "You should have been more careful when you made your wish."

There's new people in the house now. There's a man, forty years old, which is at least nineteen years too old for his twenty-one year old bride. Violet knows why he married this young girl, she's seen him on his computer at night looking at dirty pictures. He married the youngest girl he could, and sometimes he wishes he lived in Africa or the Middle East so he could take someone even younger. It turns Violet's stomach.

But there's also a boy, a year younger than Violet was when she took her life. His name is John and he's kind and sweet and a little fucked up, but not too fucked up to repeat Violet's mistakes. Tate has seen her watching him. He doesn't like it, but he's too happy just to have Violet's friendship at this point to say anything or to do anything. A part of Violet wants to tell him not to worry because her attraction to the boy isn't at all sexual, or even emotional. Violet Harmon would have been thirty-one and while her thoughts are still that of an angsty teen, a part of her wonders what it would have been like to be a mom. She doesn't want to be this boy's ghost girlfriend like Tate was to her, all those years ago. She wants to hug him and kiss his forehead and maybe make him a snack cut into shapes when he comes home from school.

She doesn't tell Tate though, because even though she's starting to move on she's still angry enough to let him suffer for a little while.

The child bride is the boys older sister. They have are no parents. Violet knows what that feels like. The man doesn't like the fact that John has nowhere else to go and uses him as an outlet for his anger. The man is a teacher and hates that he can only look at all those beautiful sixteen year old girls and not touch. It makes him crazy and even though his wife is only barely in her twenties he swears he's starting to see wrinkles around her eyes. When the man can't take it anymore he screams at John until he's hoarse. He never hits him, but Violet thinks that maybe one day he will. That thought is just enough. Violet decides that the man has got to go.

Living Violet never would have hurt anybody. Never. Even if the man deserved to die, she would have scared him or turned him in to the cops or maybe cut his dick off. The dead Violet is much more vengeful. The dead Violet wants the man to bleed and burn and scream. One night, when he's looking at his dirty pictures again and thrusting his dick into a loose circle of his wrinkled fingers, he wishes he could fuck just _one_ girl, just _one _the edge of womanhood, and that he wouldn't get caught. Just one so he could know if it feels as good as it does in his fantasies. And Violet, her thoughts with an edge as sharp as a knife, thinks happily, "You should be careful what you wish for."

So she wears one of her dresses, this time without leggings and tights and two t-shirts underneath, and without a cardigan that would be at home in the Alaskan tundra in the winter over the top. Just a sun dress and her converse sneakers. She pulls her hair back and dabs on just a touch of lip gloss and a bit of the child bride's blush. She knows that she looks even younger than she is.

When she knocks on the door and asks him if he wants to buy some girl scout cookies, he almost cums in his pants.

It's almost too easy to get him to do what she wants. Too easy to lead him into his office. Too easy to get him to undo his belt and for her to climb up on top of him and to sink over his tiny dick. He's moaning and groaning and she's rolling her eyes, because sex isn't always for pleasure. Sometimes it's just a means to an end. Sometimes it's just to protect someone you love.

And in that moment, Violet knows why Tate did what he did.

She doesn't have too long to think about it, though. Because just as she has her big revelation the door bursts open and the child bride storms inside. Violet knew that the house would send her - the house is hungry, she could sense it, and it's ready to feed. It's exactly what she was waiting for. Violet hops off the man's lap and sits back to watch the show. The child bride already knows what her husband looks at online because she checks his Internet history and hates the way he treats her brother, and relishes at the opportunity to scream at him as she pushes him out of the room and down the hallway and pushes him and pushes him until he topples down the stairs and lands with eyes open and blank, dead, neck broken.

Moira comes rushing out and comforts the new lady of the house and promises her that she can take care of the body. It's easy and Moira's a pro. Violet watches from the stairs as Moira calms the child bride down and thinks about the boy she loved. The boys she loved. Her dead ghost boyfriend and her living, could be in another life son. Tate may be stuck here forever, but John would be free. When she can't watch anymore she retreats to the scene of the crime to smoke a cigarette pilfered from the husband's desk.

Hayden walks into the open door of the study, smirking.

"What do you want?" Violet asks, irritated that her fathers whore was interrupting her train of thought.

Hayden slides onto the desk. "Came to watch the show," she shrugs.

"Show's outside. You could make yourself useful for once, help Moira get rid of the body."

Hayden gives a cruel laugh. "The show is right here, girl," she says. "You. It only took you fifteen years, but you finally realized the truth."

"What truth?"

"That you're no better than any of us," she says. Her voice is mean but sympathetic too, like a hand that soothes your skin after it's slapped you.

Violet blows her hair out of her eyes. "I know," she says. She did.

A cop came to ask about the old man, but the child bride was calm. John didn't know where his brother-in-law went but was just glad he was gone. The cop probably would have and should have asked more questions but he couldn't concentrate when that red-headed maid was prancing around in thigh highs and a feather duster and his raging hard on felt like it was going to explode if he didn't have her lips around his cock _that fucking second. _Finally he just said, "If you hear from him, let me know," and got the hell out of there because he didn't want to lose his job for fucking a potential witness.

The child bride and John left the next day.

Violet watches them leave from a window.

"I'm sorry," Tate says, stepping from behind her to stare out the window at John and the child bride.

"It's okay," Violet says.

"Will you miss him?"

"Not as much as I've missed you."

Tate's startled by her confession. He's even more startled when she reaches out and takes his hand. He doesn't speak. He doesn't want to frighten her away.

"I understand now, why you did what you did."

"Do you?"

And she does. She knows how Nora, the mother he never had and always wanted, must have cried. How Tate didn't know Vivien or Violet or anything that hadn't been living in the house with him for the last seventeen years, and how he must have thought it was his golden opportunity when Vivien moved in, when the thrill went through her when she saw the Rubber suit. Sometimes sex is to protect someone you love. She nods.

"Do you forgive me?"

"No."

"Are you still mad?"

"No."

She takes the hand that holds his and pulls him to one of the houses many bedrooms, the child bride has left all the furniture behind. "Come on."

"Where are we going?" Tate asks, all little boy nervous and excited at the same time.

"I'm going to sleep, and you're going to hold me until I wake up again."

If she's stuck in here with devil, might as well takes what she wants in the bargain.

* * *

><p>The house is heaven.<p>

Violet Harmon has been dead twenty years and she finally knows the truth. It's the happily ever after everyone always wants but nobody has the balls to take. The permenant residents of the house have taken it. Lorainne and the girls play tea party every day, try on the dresses of the new little girls that live here. Nobody will take them away from their mommy or the house. The new lady of the house loves Moira, lavishes praise on her, and Moira hasn't even appeared as her sex kitten self to the husband. The husband is a pediatrician, and he treats Nora's little Cal. He's mystified that he doesn't seem to ever get bigger but he's been talking to another doctor from the neighborhood, a Dr. Montgomery, and he keeps getting new ideas and strokes of brilliance that always make him forget about the little boy that doesn't grow.

And there are cracks in the family, places where the darkness will creep in, but then the house will come to the rescue and give them everything they wanted but didn't know how to ask for. That's what God does, he answers your prayers but never in the way you expect. Sooner rather than later one of the family will join them and find their own happily ever after. But thats a story for another day.

The family is gone today and the house is empty, and Tate and Violet are outside in the backyard, fucking on the chaise lounge.

They've grown back together again. Twenty years and the understanding of each other that the house brings has helped heal all the festering wounds that formed when Violet learned the truth about her first, last, and only lover. She has never forgiven Tate, and never will, but knowing the source of all the darkness that lives in his mind has helped her to forget why she needs to forgive him in the first place. She's finally let her own darkness out to play. The house is heaven because now she can be exactly who she wants to be and there's no "who she should be" to stop her. She's hurt people in the house since John left. She's even taken another life. She can be angry and hateful and there's somebody to hurt, to set free from all the expectations that society puts on them. She can express her rage and bring someone to heaven at the same time. It's a win-win.

She feels like an angel.

And when she cries, Tate is there to comfort her. And when she's wet and needy, Tate's there to give her what she wants.

It's already the second time today they've had sex, although the first time was more like stereotypical "making love." It was tender and gentle and they whispered sweet nothings in each others ears.

This time, it's fucking. This time, it's animal.

And that's the best part, that's how she knows it's heaven. If they were normal, if they were real instead of a Pinocchio boy and girl, they wouldn't be like this. She'd be almost forty and he'd be in his fifties. They'd be old and tired and maybe even fat, wrinkled and boring. There'd be houses to clean and kids to take care of and tears to cry because their kids hate them, just like they hated and loved their parents. They wouldn't be like _this_. Now, she's all pink and pout and he's all muscle and teen sex god and they have nothing to worry about but each other. When they feel the need to play house there's Cal and Lorraine's girls and the new girls in the house and Beauregard, but they can disappear when they're done and bored with it and want to go back to finding new places in the house and positions that make them scream.

Today, they're in the backyard, naked, because Violet always wanted to fuck outside and somehow in the last five years since she's let him back into her heart and her cunt they haven't managed to do it out there yet. The sun glints off her breasts. She's riding him, facing away from him, looking around the backyard and noticing all the houses that have windows that people could be watching them from. She's not worried because if anyone shows up, they'll simply disappear, but then she thinks that maybe next time they fuck outside she'll wait until she knows somebody can see them, because being watched sounds kind of hot.

He's sitting up on the chaise, her legs straddling him and are thrown over the sides. She's grinding on top of him, feeling his cock so deep inside she feels like it could split her open. He's gripping her hips hard enough to leave a bruise because he knows that she likes it when he makes it hurt a little.

"Fuck me. Harder."

She obeys. She always does. She rises up a little further with every stroke, making it feel that much deeper when she slams down to him again. He groans and slaps her ass, hard, and Violet goes even faster. She loves the sting. He slaps her again and reaches around with his other hand, stroking her clit. Violet looks back over her shoulder at him and begs.

"Please."

Her voice is breathless. He spanks her again and moves his fingers faster over her clit, pushing harder. She's close.

"Please," she begs again, breathlessly. He spanks her again, hard enough this time that she almost loses her rhythm and then he presses his fingers insistently over her clit. She jerks and cums and rides it out until she's almost close again.

He slides her off and slips her below him, and he enters her again with a little moan. She knows he's close, and she knows what he wants. They've been doing this long enough to know how the other likes it.

He pumps in and out, harder each time. She gets lost in the sensation and the way his pubic bone is hitting her clit in just the right spot and almost forgets that he hasn't cum yet, but then he whimpers and she remembers.

She sits up and sinks her teeth into his carotid artery.

Blood sprays out over her, gushes over her neck and breasts and stomach, and then slows. The cut heals a moment after she's done it. But now she's covered in blood, which drips down her breasts in beads that move tantalizingly slowly over her nipples. They slide over her tiny stomach and into her cunt. Tate tilts his head down and looks at his cock sliding in and out of her, which is now red with his blood. He whimpers, pumps faster. When he looks up and into her eyes his pupils are black with love and heat and gratitude for knowing that she'll always give him what he needs.

She runs a hand through his blond locks and grabs a handful and pulls, because he likes it when it hurts too.

His pace is frenzied. So close. "Mine," he says possessively.

"Yours. Forever. Just yours." And now she's all his fantasies at once. Covered in blood and completely submissive and belonging only to him. And she feels his dick twitch and his heat spilling into her as his strangled voice chokes out her name.

And she's happy.

But she's also sad that it's over, she still feels horny but before she has a chance to vocalize that thought he's slipped out of her and bowed his head between her legs, licking up his cum and her wetness that's still gushing and his blood. And he runs his tongue slowly up her clit, then swirls it in a dance that he's memorized, because in the five years they've been togeher again he's learned every trick that makes her thighs shake. And she feels herself getting close again, almost on the edge, driven crazy by the way he licks her clit like he's eating an ice cream cone. It feels so good. So fucking good. And as she gets closer to cumming he reaches up his hand and wraps his long fingers around her throat. They can do whatever they want now, because if he holds on too long she'll only pop up after and smile. There's no need for safe words in the murder house.

Tate punctuates the squeeze of her neck with a swirl of his tongue slowly over her clit and she's loosing oxygen. Just when she's ready, when she thinks nothing could ever feel better than this he squeezes her throat closed, flicks her clit with his tongue and shoves two fingers inside of her so her cunt won't clench in vain. She can't breathe and stars explode behind her eyes and she's never cum that hard, but she says that every time they've finished fucking. She thinks she's died and gone to heaven.

And then she laughs when she realized she has.

"What's funny?" Tate asks softly, brushing her hair out of her face. Her clit and body are still twitching in pleasure and she smiles, already wondering when they can do it again.

"Nothing," she reassures him. She reaches out for him and he snuggles beside her, sated and happy and ready for a post-coital cuddle and nap.

"I love you," she whispers in his ear, pressing a kiss into his temple.

He turns to her and smiles. No matter how many times she says it, he always acts like it's the first time. "I love you too," he says.

They hold each other until they fall asleep.

* * *

><p>The devil is many things, the least of which is beautiful. The most of which is hungry. Once he gets what he wants and another broken person gives up their soul to him and to the house, he's full - but it's never long before he wants his next meal.<p>

He heard a line that played from one of the screens that the inhabitants scattered throughout the house and stared at, trying to forget the way that the house made them feel. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist." The devil that was the house didn't usually pay attention to the screens but had felt happy when it heard that last line, because it was true.

Every soul the house took learned the truth eventually. Tate learned it when he watched Violet take a bottle full of pills and tried in vain to wake her. Violet learned when she straddled the dirty old man that joined their ranks to save the boy. The devil didn't want the boy, he wanted the dirty old man, because the more broken and fucked up the person was the better it felt to eat them alive. The souls of the broken were like eating lobster. The souls of the innocent were like eating dog shit. But when you're hungry enough, you'd be surprised what you're willing to eat. A meals a meal, and the devil was never one to turn down a feast.

The trick that the devil pulled was to make them forget that they had ever learned the truth by giving them what they all wanted most - understanding. Once they knew all the hows and whys they stopped asking questions, stopped caring about the outcome, and started living in the devils playground that he had created. Loving, playing, fucking each other, they were happy and dark and were so easy to be the chess pieces he needed to get another meal. He put Nora in front of the boy who needed his mommy and the boy went out and created a vessel for the devils seed. He let the maid see how the slimy Persian had broken a promise and she bit the head of his cock off. He may not have died there but the pain and evil of the act was enough to keep the devil full for awhile. He gave the little gay boy Chad and Patrick and made him see how happy he could be with two new daddies that were just like him and the devil got three souls. He didn't eat again for three years after that.

Violet had figured it out the closest, but she still got it wrong. It's not making the wish that puts the plan into motion. Everyone in the house makes wishes. The devil can put the ideas in your head and prance sexy maids and murdered mistresses and murder victims in front of you, but the choice has to be yours. Always yours. And that's his ace in the hole, his house full of broken people that he's "fixed" but never in the way that they wanted and that do his bidding. The only thing he can't do is take the lives from living, but his arsenal of the dead do that for him, but only after they've made the choice to take what he's offering.

The house always wins.

And it's hungry again.

It sits back and surveys it's children, and plots how it will take it's next victim.


End file.
